1. (a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display and a driving method thereof.
2. (b) Description of Related Art
An LCD includes a pair of panels provided with field generating electrodes and a liquid crystal (LC) layer having dielectric anisotropy, which is disposed between the two panels. The field generating electrodes generally include a plurality of pixel electrodes connected to switching elements such as thin film transistors (TFTs) to be supplied with data voltages and a common electrode covering an entire surface of a panel and supplied with a common voltage. A pair of field generating electrodes that generate the electric field in cooperation with each other and a liquid crystal disposed therebetween form so called a liquid crystal capacitor.
The LCD applies the voltages to the field generating electrodes to generate electric field to the liquid crystal layer, and the strength of the electric field can be controlled by adjusting the voltage across the liquid crystal capacitor. Since the electric field determine the orientations of liquid crystal molecules and the molecular orientations determine the transmittance of light passing through the liquid crystal layer, the light transmittance is adjusted by controlling the applied voltages, thereby obtaining desired images.
In order to prevent image deterioration due to long-time application of the unidirectional electric field, etc., polarity of the data voltages with respect to the common voltage is reversed every frame, every row, or every dot.
Among various inversion types, a dot inversion reversing the polarity every given number of pixels reduces vertical crosstalk or vertical flickering due to kickback voltage, thereby improving image quality. However, the polarity inversion of the data voltages flowing in each data line may require complicated driving scheme and may cause signal delay. Although the signal delay may be reduced by employing low resistivity metal, etc., it may complicate the manufacturing process and increase the production cost.
On the contrary, a column inversion reverses the voltage polarity every given number of pixel columns. Since the column inversion does not reverse the polarity of the data voltages applied to each data line during one frame, the issue of the signal delay is remarkably reduced.
However, the column inversion is inferior to the dot inversion in the vertical crosstalk and the vertical flickering, etc.